Differential Market Reaction to Data Security Breaches: A Screening Perspective

This paper aims to identify breach- and firm-level characteristics that may account for the heterogenous stock market reaction to data breaches. Drawing upon the screening theory, this paper examines the possibility of three breach characteristics (breach severity, breach locus and breach controllability) and two firm attributes (CEO stock ownership, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance) serving as information screens to influence stock market reaction to a data breach incident. Using an archival dataset compiled from multiple sources, we examine 607 data breaches from 2004 to 2018 and find that the stock market reacts more negatively if a breach is more severe (i.e., involving more data records and financially sensitive consumer data), controllable (i.e., could have been prevented), and if the breached firm has weak corporate governance, as indicated by low CEO stock ownership. Furthermore, CSR provides an “insurance-like” protection by attenuating the negative effects of breach severity, breach controllability, and poor corporate governance on firm value. Findings of this research highlight the relevance of screening theory as a theoretical lens for examining the contextual dependence of stock market reaction to data breaches on key breach- and firm-level characteristics

A New Microfluidic Device For Complete, Continuous Separation Of Microparticles

A microchannel with symmetric sharp corners is reported for particle separation, based on the inter-play between the inertial lift force and the centrifugal force induced by sharp corners. At an appropriate flow rate, the centrifugal force is larger than the inertial lift force on large particles, while the inertial lift force is dominant on small particles. Hence large particles are centrifuged to the center, while small par-ticles are focused at side streams, achieving complete particle separation. The device requires no sheath flow, avoiding the dilution of analyte sample and complex operation, and can be potentially used for many lab-on-a-chip applications

Event-Guided Procedure Planning from Instructional Videos with Text Supervision

In this work, we focus on the task of procedure planning from instructional videos with text supervision, where a model aims to predict an action sequence to transform the initial visual state into the goal visual state. A critical challenge of this task is the large semantic gap between observed visual states and unobserved intermediate actions, which is ignored by previous works. Specifically, this semantic gap refers to that the contents in the observed visual states are semantically different from the elements of some action text labels in a procedure. To bridge this semantic gap, we propose a novel event-guided paradigm, which first infers events from the observed states and then plans out actions based on both the states and predicted events. Our inspiration comes from that planning a procedure from an instructional video is to complete a specific event and a specific event usually involves specific actions. Based on the proposed paradigm, we contribute an Event-guided Prompting-based Procedure Planning (E3P) model, which encodes event information into the sequential modeling process to support procedure planning. To further consider the strong action associations within each event, our E3P adopts a mask-and-predict approach for relation mining, incorporating a probabilistic masking scheme for regularization. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 202

(3E,5E)-3,5-Bis(4-hy­droxy-3,5-di­methoxy­benzyl­idene)oxan-4-one monohydrate

In the title compound, C23H24O8·H2O, the six-membered ring of the oxan-4-one (tetra­hydro­pyran-4-one) ring displays an envelope conformation with the heterocyclic O atom at the flap position. The dihedral angles between the terminal benzene rings is 37.23 (10)°. Classical intermolecular O—H⋯O and weak C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds are present in the crystal structure

Diversifying Spatial-Temporal Perception for Video Domain Generalization

Video domain generalization aims to learn generalizable video classification models for unseen target domains by training in a source domain. A critical challenge of video domain generalization is to defend against the heavy reliance on domain-specific cues extracted from the source domain when recognizing target videos. To this end, we propose to perceive diverse spatial-temporal cues in videos, aiming to discover potential domain-invariant cues in addition to domain-specific cues. We contribute a novel model named Spatial-Temporal Diversification Network (STDN), which improves the diversity from both space and time dimensions of video data. First, our STDN proposes to discover various types of spatial cues within individual frames by spatial grouping. Then, our STDN proposes to explicitly model spatial-temporal dependencies between video contents at multiple space-time scales by spatial-temporal relation modeling. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks of different types demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023. Code is available at https://github.com/KunyuLin/STDN

Atomic physics on a 50 nm scale: Realization of a bilayer system of dipolar atoms

Atomic physics has greatly advanced quantum science, mainly due to the ability to control the position and internal quantum state of atoms with high precision, often at the quantum limit. The dominant tool for this is laser light, which can structure and localize atoms in space (e.g., in optical tweezers, optical lattices, 1D tubes or 2D planes). Due to the diffraction limit of light, the natural length scale for most experiments with atoms is on the order of 500 nm or larger. Here we implement a new super-resolution technique which localizes and arranges atoms on a sub-50 nm scale, without any fundamental limit in resolution. We demonstrate this technique by creating a bilayer of dysprosium atoms, mapping out the atomic density distribution with sub-10 nm resolution, and observing dipolar interactions between two physically separated layers via interlayer sympathetic cooling and coupled collective excitations. At 50 nm, dipolar interactions are 1,000 times stronger than at 500 nm. For two atoms in optical tweezers, this should enable purely magnetic dipolar gates with kHz speed

A Thiazole Orange Derivative Targeting the Bacterial Protein FtsZ Shows Potent Antibacterial Activity.

The prevalence of multidrug resistance among clinically significant bacteria calls for the urgent development of new antibiotics with novel mechanisms of action. In this study, a new small molecule exhibiting excellent inhibition of bacterial cell division with potent antibacterial activity was discovered through cell-based screening. The compound exhibits a broad spectrum of bactericidal activity, including the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus and NDM-1 Escherichia coli. The in vitro and in vivo results suggested that this compound disrupts the dynamic assembly of FtsZ protein and Z-ring formation through stimulating FtsZ polymerization. Moreover, this compound exhibits no activity on mammalian tubulin polymerization and shows low cytotoxicity on mammalian cells. Taken together, these findings could provide a new chemotype for development of antibacterials with FtsZ as the target

(3E,5E)-3,5-Bis(4-hy­droxy­benzyl­idene)oxan-4-one

In the title compound, C19H16O4, there are two 4-hy­droxy­benzyl substituents on the oxan-4-one (tetra­hydro­pyran-4-one) ring, which exhibits an envelope conformation. The dihedral angles between pyran­one ring and the two benzene rings are 26.69 (9) and 36.01 (9)° while the benzene rings make a dihedral angle of 20.88 (10)°. In the crystal, mol­ecules are linked by inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into a supra­molecular three-dimensional twofold inter­penetrating hydrogen-bonded network

Objective assessment of urban built environment related to physical activity — development, reliability and validity of the China Urban Built Environment Scan Tool (CUBEST)

Background: Some aspects of the neighborhood built environment may influence residents’ physical activity, which in turn, affects their health. This study aimed to develop an urban built environment evaluation tool and conduct necessary reliability and validity tests. Methods: A 41-item urban built environment scan tool was developed to objectively assess the neighborhood built environment features related to physical activity. Six neighborhoods in Hangzhou were selected from three types of administrative planning units. A pair of auditors independently assessed all of the 205 street segments at the same time. Half of the segments (n = 104) were audited twice by the same auditor after a two-week time interval. Inter-rater reliability was assessed by comparing the audits of paired observers, while intra-rater reliability was evaluated by comparing an auditor’s repeated assessments of the same segments. The construct validity was tested using factor analysis. Results: The inter-rater reliability for most items was above 0.8. The intra-rater reliability for most items was above 0.4, and was lower than corresponding inter-rater reliability. Six factors were extracted by factor analysis and the factor loading matrix showed good construct validity. Conclusions: The CUBEST is a reliable and valid instrument that can be used to assess the physical activity-related built environment in Hangzhou, and potentially other cities in China